Shifts

Iris Touliatou develops her works in relation to the infrastructures and processes—spatial, administrative, linguistic—that are inherent to the site of exhibition. Her solo exhibition "Shifts" at Kunstverein München, her most extensive in Germany to date, is conceived as a site-responsive constellation of scenes that position the institutional framework both as backdrop and as co-constitutive material. In this way, the exhibition anchors itself within the rhythms and procedures of the Kunstverein, at the same time expanding them. Composed as protocols, Touliatou’s works reveal the mechanisms that govern organizations and their actors, while extending beyond the procedural to questions of affect, labor, and language. At the core of Touliatou’s practice lies a kind of material and immaterial intervention, aligning with Kunstverein München’s commitment to rethinking its own functions and histories. “Object/scenes,” a term borrowed from Lauren Berlant, turn the association into both object and host, and its actors into both subject and host. They examine the artist’s own conditions of possibility, shifting constellations of intentions and permissions, and entangled infrastructures—including the neighboring Deutsches Theatermuseum; ongoing negotiations with the landlord (the Bavarian Palaces Administration); points of intersection with the institution’s publics; and its conditions of visibility, social relations, production, and funding unfolding in real time. Operating from within while leaning outward, Touliatou mobilizes infrastructural thinking to probe how forms of labor, class, and citizenship appear, circulate, or are withheld within institutional frameworks. With a change in directorship imminent and the current curatorial team preparing its final exhibition, Touliatou’s work navigates a shifting terrain of civic and structural negotiation. In this context, Kunstverein München is shaped not only by what is presented, but by how presentation is made possible, namely through the politics of time, resources, and attention. The institution is not understood as a neutral container, but as an active agent in the formation of subjectivities, publics, and potential futures.